


Peripeteia

by whiskey_johnny



Category: Maurice - E. M. Forster
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:35:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3098450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskey_johnny/pseuds/whiskey_johnny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Peripeteia, ( Greek: 'reversal') the turning point in a drama after which the plot moves steadily to its denouement." -- Encyclopaedica Britannica </p><p>A pastiche in the name of the true OTP in Maurice - Forster/Compound Sentences</p><p>*</p><p>A New Year Resolutions fic for Yuletide 2014 [NYR 15 tag does not yet seem available]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peripeteia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rachel2205](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rachel2205/gifts).



_Body, remember not only how much you were loved,_  
 _not only the beds on which you lay,_  
 _but also those desires for you_  
 _that glowed plainly in the eyes,_  
 _and trembled in the voice—and some_  
 _chance obstacle made futile._  
 _Now that all of them belong to the past,_  
 _it almost seems as if you had yielded_  
 _to those desires—how they glowed,_  
 _remember, in the eyes gazing at you;_  
 _how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body._

\-- Constantine Cavafy, trans. Rae Dalven

 

Clive sat in the theatre of Dionysus. The stage was empty, as it had been for many centuries, the auditorium empty; the sun had set though the Acropolis behind still radiated heat. He saw barren plains running down to the sea, Salamis, Aegina, mountains, all blended in a violet evening. Here dwelt his gods—Pallas Athene in her first place: he might if he chose imagine her shrine untouched, and her statue catching the last of the glow. She understood all men, though motherless and a virgin. He had been coming to thank her for years because she had lifted him out of the mire.

Yet in the place in which he found himself - not Greece, but a stranger land to him by far - he could not call upon the virgin goddess.  In this new understanding that was born within him he had turned his back upon her and all his gods, and entered into a wholly unfamiliar world - one perhaps meant for him from birth, yet more incomprehensible to him than any foreign country.

The enormity of such a world stretched out before him, and he thought that he must feel as settlers in the New World might, surveying that great empty and savage land - but this was no uncultivated shore to which he had come, but a world more ancient and settled than any Greece, one long tilled and made fertile by the hands of man and woman together on the plough.  He felt in that moment that he, in the necessary barrenness of his own nature, had wandered all his life in some rocky wasteland, and now stood in wonder at the great green upwelling of the world’s long-husbanded Spring.  What wonder, then, that most men went on as they did, unquestioning, in the rich straight furrow of that abundant world?  His presiding Pallas might have tended the olive trees and brought them to ripeness, but from her own flesh nothing sprang; only Erechtheus, that strange monster-king born from a repulsive brute passion and brushed aside - and in thinking so he thought of Maurice, with a strange shuddering sort of clench within his heart.

He put the thought aside.  His own flesh had never yielded anything, being slim and spare and delicate as a child; lacking the robust energy of other boys at school, and fearing besides the undesired effects their thoughtless rough-housing might have on him, he had never dared engaged fully with the world of the senses.  His own pale unathletic flesh had only ever been a thing of disgust to him, a mystery of hungers and weaknesses unassuaged and unassuagable.  And, knowing the nature of his heart’s longings, he had long felt himself unlikely to ever see a child in a woman’s arms and know it had come from the natural fructifying force of his own loins: he had long since resigned himself to barrenness.  No eunuch like Cornwallis, never the less he was left with him upon that thin rocky strait, set apart from the generative world.

It had long seemed to him a part of the sincere sense of damnation that had lived within him all his conscious life.  There had ever been within his heart something which cried out: _I would be good! O God, only let me be good!_  In another age he might have entered a religious order, and poured all the deep and fierce devotion that was surely within him into the service of a God who would surely forgive him so long as he did (and he did, for all those secretive tormented years of youth) only honestly repent within his soul; yet instead he found himself forced into endless too-intimate contact with other boys, healthy young animals who would embrace and fight and embrace again without a shadow of Clive’s own bitter urges. 

How, then, should he come to look upon his body as anything other than a thing to be battled and denied, when it betrayed him as surely as his heart at the lightest touch from those upon whom his affections had, in his despite, settled themselves?  And so God, who had commanded Man to _go forth and multiply_ , ordained that Clive in his hidden sin should have no part of that healthy natural world that others entered so easily into, but should rather be a barren limb.  And how much more bitter for him, in whom the hopes of so long a line of ancestors were vested, that he should be without issue!  Penge and its inhabitants weighed upon his mind each time his classmates spoke frankly or coarsely of women and their response thereto, for no female flesh had ever engendered the slightest tremor in his own blood.   _I am not a eunuch_ , he had thought, _but I might as well be, for how should I ever find in myself the capacity, brought to bed with some girl in the darkness of the master bedroom?_  The responsibility weighed heavily upon him, the knowledge of his body’s utter failure in its ultimate purpose.

And so he had disdained the flesh, traitor and coward that it was, and sought the life of the soul, only to be brought to cruelly low by the love that he could not keep from welling in his heart.  The dear kind cousin who had walked beside his bath chair in oblivious friendliness would have been horrified by the despair that he brought the young man to, though less virulent than his horror would have been at its cause.  And the greater grief in him, that must break any young man’s heart: to know that he would never be loved as he might love, that no soul would rise in answer to the calling in his heart, but rather turn away in horror.  Unable to bear more natural fruit, the boy Clive would none the less have poured out everything within him in such fierce tenderness as only youth may have - and yet must necessarily be thwarted, all his spring’s passion turned in upon itself.

Even after his tormented spirit was soothed by the _Phaedrus_ ’ reassuring truths, and some hope of one-day pure companionship blossomed in his breast, the grossness of his body haunted him.  The neurasthenic weakness brought on by his breakdown had helped at least to quell the worst of his carnality, a state that would persist for some years, but its memory was a constant uneasy prickle in his soul.  So, too, were the memories of his own helplessness when in that state, that he had to be washed and bathed and toileted like a child - little wonder, then, that when Maurice in his fierce overbearing tenderness sought to help him so his whole spirit should convulse against it and cry out, no more!

Maurice, Maurice!  Clive turned his head restlessly, trying to shake away the vision of his friend.  Finding in him the image of the hale and careless boys of his schooldays, yet one who could return that immense upwelling of emotion, Clive had been horrified to find his blood stirring at Maurice’s early kisses, the tender caress of his hair and neck and face.  Before he had declared himself it was easy enough to take some warm pleasure in it, a tender sort of comfort, but now that they were so close he found himself standing at a sort of perilous edge, beyond which all manner of genuinely unthinkable temptation lay.  If ever once he should let himself go… 

This was the fear in him, trembling unarticulate beyond the conscious edges of his mind; and so when asked that evening in the Blue Room, _will you kiss me_ , it did not occur to him to do other than to draw away, into those far safer realms that he had long since come to call home, and thus cut himself off from the risks of passion.  If he had had anything in the world to pattern himself upon, save for the noble heights of Plato and the frivolity of Risley’s set, then he might perhaps have been saved; but he was, after all, only a boy, and one who had been for so long so very much alone, shut up in a cold and empty room of the mind which was all the world allowed him.

It would not have occurred to Clive that he had lived all his life in dread, having known nothing else, and it did not now.  To see it would have been too painful, to fully occupy that dread.  Instead it remained closed up in his mind, where it might do no overt harm, but instead cast a much deeper and more insidious influence over the course of his deep and genuine love.  If Maurice had been of a different temperament he might have sensed it, have found a way to shelter Clive from it, but lacking it within himself it did not occur to him that any such thing might be working upon them.

The damnable thing, Clive thought now, was that they had gone on so long in perfect contentment.  Had he never become sick, they might have done so indefinitely.  Though he had long disavowed Christianity, the small boy in him who had cowered at the destruction of the Cities of the Plain knew that this must surely be his punishment.  The misery of influenza became a hysterical spasm such as that which had laid him low at fifteen, characterised now by revulsion rather than despair.  Unable to ignore the foul exudations of his body, the pain and weakness, all the self-horror in his soul manifested itself in a thrusting-away, and so he planned to flee to Greece.

Having so long valued only men, for a woman to tend him degraded him so much less than Maurice’s unminding kindness.  Beneath his nurse’s care he returned in a fashion to infancy, at the mercy of a woman’s whim, and yet he did not resent it.  It seemed curiously natural, to be tended so, and he found her unexpectedly charming.  Expecting nothing of her mind, and quite without any pressure of desire, he came to depend quite childishly upon her approval.  As someone who had known that he must always, if revealed to the world, be a figure of disgust, to have her respond to him reassured something deep within his soul.

It excited him; it gave him hope.  He seized upon it fiercely, and sought it out: the feeling that he might enter at last into the normal life of the world, rather than being forever set apart in a small and secret world.  To walk among natural men and women as one of them - to sit in the cinema palace and imagine, for the first time in his life, that he was represented on the screen - to imagine some tentative future with children at his knee, the maternal approval he had long since ceased to crave, a love not hidden but loudly proclaimed good - all these things enchanted him, and he entered into a kind of fever or delirium of fancy.  It was perhaps understandable: he was like a man who had never seen a mirror, and upon catching a glimpse of himself at last in a looking-glass sought to see himself everywhere reflected.  And if the face he saw was not wholly his own, how was he to know? - he had been kept blind and ignorant as a mole.

As with any fever it came to a crisis; and so he collapsed, overwhelmed by the change in him.  All the edifice of his life had been built upon his understanding of his nature, and now those foundations were washed away.  If he did not love only men - if he could love women, lead a natural life - what then was he?  What meaning could the name _Clive Durham_ have, if not that of inveterate inversion, passion tightly constrained by the reins of reason?  Athene had abandoned him; Aphrodite had him in her grasp, and she was cruel, as with all those who have refused her gifts.

Everything else was foul to him now, not only his own flesh or his friendship with Maurice.  The daily drudgery of the bar - the upkeep of Penge - his mother’s interminable dispute over right of way - it all disgusted him.  How cramped and unnatural his whole life seemed, how artificial!  It drove him to needle at Maurice, to neglect his work, and made him unable to see beyond his planned escape.  There, surely, in the land of inspired and rational mind, he would be cured of the grossness that afflicted him.  If he did not think upon the possibilities of women he dwelt constantly on dirt, and on death, and longed only for silence.  For peace, though he could not frame it so, for rest from the demon fear that had bedevilled him all the days of his life.

Yet now he was here, Greece offered him no salvation.  The streets of Athens were cramped and dirty, as filled with beggars as any London slum; the columns of antiquitiy were stained and leaning, cracked as rotten teeth.  He had thought that being parted from Maurice would bring him peace, yet he found instead that he wandered wistfully, turning on occasion to address a remark to a companion so many miles distant.  And the worst of it, the very worst of it, was that his body would not lie quiet.  Having come to notice women, he had not felt the need to limit the manner of his noticing, and those parts of his flesh he had long neglected had come to fierce tormenting life.  Here the turn of a neck - here a skirt drawn aside from a slim limb - here soft and scented hair brushing against him on a crowded omnibus.

Alone it might have delighted him, but it did not come alone.  Instead he found his eyes drawn inexorably to slouching swarthy youths on street corners, boys as soft-skinned and fresh as any Theognis praised, hard-handed labourers carrying hods; everywhere the world of masculinity had sprung into sharp physical relief, and it tormented him.  At night he dreamed of hard embraces, grappling like a schoolboy with his fellow, and woke confused and damp-sheeted with Maurice’s name upon his lips.  He had let desire slip the rein of reason, and it would not be recalled.

Perhaps it was some unconscious irony that drew him to the theatre of Dionysus.  It was surely a kind of madness that had seized him, a drunkenness of the senses, and no appeal to distant Pallas would set him free from it.  He knew one thing for certain: he could see Maurice no more, for he could not now embrace him in chaste affection.  The mere thought had his blood burning, his body rebelling fiercely at the thought of his friend’s firm body against his own, his thick brown hands upon his skin, kisses not comradely but demanding opening his lips.

He shuddered convulsively and closed his eyes, daring to think no further.  His pen hovered over the notebook, prepared to sign the note: _Against my will I have become normal.  I cannot help it._

Normal!  What weight that word had, what longing!  A world that welcomed and did not condemn, a wife and heir, the line of Durhams unbroken by his own...his own _perversion_ ; longing beaded sweat upon his skin, made his hand shake.  He could desire women now, he need no longer find companionship and love only in other men.  He might fully enter public life without fear of blackmail, might one day sit beside his fire with grandchildren at his knee.  The hand that did not hold the pen was fisted hard against his breast, beneath his sternum, as if to hold his heart within him, the cramp of longing was so strong.  It was a physical agony, and he cried out softly, as in pain.  He thought, in anguish: I have never known desire as strong as this. 

And then all at once he knew that was untrue, for an equal longing rose to meet it: the longing for his dear friend’s arms around him in this torment, not in some dark lust but in the good sweet love they had so long shared, the true love of comrades who stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the shield wall against some enemy that far outmasses them yet must be faced.  He was come, though he did not know it clear, to his own Thermopylae, and in that narrow place rose up the ghosts of comrades.  Not his dear love alone, but all the boys that he had yearned for in his youth; the kindly cousin by his bath chair; his Cambridge friends, and even Risley; and behind them the kind old shade of Plato leading Socrates, Phaedrus, Lysias, all the poets to whom his soul had thrilled, even David and Jonathan and the disciple that Jesus loved.  He thought in the dim violet light he saw Pallas Athene, virgin and motherless, shake her aegis over Pentelicus and Parnitha, and behind her, rising faint and jewelled in the starry dusk, Aphrodite Urania crowned with light.

He was crying now; he could not see.  “Maurice,” he said, “Maurice.”  He had dropped his pen, and it had rolled away somewhere on the marbled ground; the paper was crushed within his fist.  His head was in his hands, and he seized his hair as if to tear at it.  Surely this was madness too, and it was pain, yet it was sweet, a trembling penetration of his soul by love, no longer shut out but welcomed in.  “Darling,” he sobbed, as he had never done - had never let himself - he could not bear it, yet he must - he would - he would -

He came to himself in darkness, only the faintest glow left in the western sky. Then sun was gone, and with it that brief bright dream of a normal life, and he wept for that, a brief scatter of tears, but he was mostly spent.  That he could desire women was plain to him - that he would not act upon it plainer still.  He knew his heart, as he had known it since he was a boy; he was not yet unafraid, now would ever wholly be, but he had come within himself to a deep still place.

The cypress trees were dim lean shadows against the stone.  The night smelled of the city still, smog and sewage, and there came a soft light wind that stirred the trees and brought the smell of the sea to him.  Somewhere beyond that sea, beyond Sunium and Cythera, beyond England’s familiar white cliffs, in the London night Maurice surely lay uneasy, thinking of his friend.  And that friend was already voyaging towards him in his heart, across the deep silent sea of understanding, carried by a longing that he at last owned wholly and completely in himself, body and soul now finally at one, so that one night soon they would not be divided.

**Author's Note:**

> The last sentence is, of course, a reference to Radclyffe Hall's "The Well of Loneliness". The first paragraph is Forster's own.


End file.
